The Vicious Circle of Reproductive Rights

Anti-Choice conservatives want there to be more restrictions on contraception. Some want to outlaw it altogether. Many of then cite Planned Parenthood and similar clinics as a place to get it cheap, without insurance lending a hand.

In the same breath, anti-choice lawmakers want to cut funding to those clinics, which would cause many to shut down (so yeah, you can get your pills for free, but you’ll have to drive hours out of the way to do so) or no longer be able to dispense said contraception at inexpensive rates.

Of course abortion would be illegalized, even criminalized.

Health coverage during pregnancy (because it’s not a disease) will be shoddy at best, leaving the mother on the hook for a number of medical expenses.

Employers aren’t required to have child care services, schools are constantly losing funding, and we can’t even take care of the kids that are out there now.

I think that’s everything.

I dare any self-proclaimed Pro-Lifer (Anti-Choicer) to immediately go sign up with an adoption agency right now. Do it. If your interests are truly in the lives of the unborn, do it. Do you even realize how traumatizing pregnancy and childbirth can be for someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant in the first place? If you can’t even trust that woman to make a decision for herself, how can you trust her to grow a baby? Or does she lose her own free will there too? Will women be shipped out to the “homes for unwed mothers” and forced to eat right and exercise and take vitamins and do all of that stuff until the kid is born?

I was never aware that family planning was an important and intense medical and emotional decision that could only be made between a legislator and his political interest group.

What’s next? State sanctioned sterilizations again? A woman seeking an abortion is forced to have a baby anyway, and is then sterilized under the assertion that “she didn’t want to have a child, so she won’t ever have to worry about it”?

You may laugh, but something similar used to happen in 32 – THIRTY-TWO – states in the 50s and 60s. Sterilizations were performed only on women and girls (no males in this club) based on epilepsy, sickness, or “feeblemindedness.” The fuck? That’s right, feeble-fuck-mindedness. Only seven of those states have ever publicly acknowledged it or apologized to their victims.

In fact, in 1959, NC State Senator Wilbur Jolly tried to institute a bill that asserted if a woman gave birth to two children (not twins), it was proof of her feeblemindedness. If that’s not scary enough, let’s talk about how many young girls were sterilized without their knowledge, and how many were coerced into it.

One girl, at the age of 18, living with her mother and six siblings, was told by a state appointed social worker that if she did not consent to sterilization after her child was born, then her mother’s welfare benefits would be cut off. So, in order to make sure her brothers and sisters had food, shelter, she agreed, after being told it was reversible. Of course, eight years later when she got married and wanted to continue building her own family, she found out it wasn’t. Her marriage has since fallen apart.

Or 13-year-old Lela Mae Dunston, who was taken to the hospital under the premise that it was a check-up from having just given birth. Her mother signed the consent form under pressure, again, of losing public assistance. She didn’t even know what happened until she was 16 and her aunt told her what happened. When Dunston found the document authorizing the abominable procedure, it read, “Lela Mae has very little understanding of how her body function and is easily led into sex relations. Both Lela Mae and the mother understand that sterilization will result in Lela Mae not being able to reproduce and both seem happy with this.”

What should we talk about first? The fact that you’re writing a little girl off as a slut or the fact that you blatantly lied on a medical document? What if that little girl was raped by her uncle and that’s how she got pregnant? Classic example of goverment being all up in the ladybizz. Dunston was thirteen! If she “had no understanding of her her body functioned”, then freaking teach her! Show her what goes on in there, teach her how to be responsible, don’t just bar her from ever being able to have children when she’s grown and stable. It’s absolutely reprehensible that this even happened.

Anti-Choicers, you’re only one step away.

DayGlo wrote yesterday about a topic she and I discussed earlier in the day, about Arizona’s Senate passing a bill making it completely legal for doctors to lie to parents about the health of their growing body inhabitor. If the baby has birth defects and the doctor, in his/her apparent omniscient wisdom, thinks the parents will abort, he doesn’t have to tell them. AND THIS IS LEGAL!

The obvious next step, is if the pregnancy will cause complications that implicitly threaten the life of the mother… the doctor can lie about those too. Just wait for it.

Oh, and let’s not forget Texas, where they’re going after the Medicaid Women’s Health Program. The program gives grants to many clinics, including places like Planned Parenthood. Now, regardless of the fact that most PP’s don’t even perform abortions, Gov. Rick Perry slashed women’s health financing by two-thirds – that 66.6%, if you needed more proof the devil was behind this nonsense – all in the name of the babies!

Apparently he can’t fathom why in the world a woman would visit a health clinic for any reason other than to receive an abortion. I mean, women don’t get breast cancer, or cervical cancer, or have any other illnesses. We’re all just dirty sluts who only go to medical professionals to have our uterii scraped out regularly.

I can only wonder… what kind of mommy-issues do these lawmakers have?

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About Melissa Limasse

| Real name - Yeah right | Location – The State of Being | Worth - $2,425,486 | Education – B.A. Sociology and Psychology, A.As. in Criminal Justice |
Single, childless, and completely satisfied with both, Ms. Limasse doesn’t fit into the traditional “female” mold. Most people would say she’s intimidating. Anything that she says here she has most likely already said out loud
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